As three-dimension (“3D”) TV has been foreseen as a part of a next wave of promising technologies for consumer electronics, the issue of lack of 3D content in the market has attracted much attention. Real-time two-dimension (“2D”) to 3D video conversion technology, the fastest way to obtain 3D content from the existing 2D video content sources, such as DVD, Blu-ray, and broadcasting, has been extensively studied. However, some disclosed conversion techniques may not be ready for real-time usage due to their high computational complexity or unsatisfactory quality.
Some disclosed conversion techniques use knowledge obtained from semantic video content analysis to reconstruct 3D objects. Furthermore, other disclosed techniques use linear perspective to obtain a geometric depth map and use color-based segmentation to obtain a qualitative depth map, and then fuse the two maps to generate the final depth map. The semantic video content analysis and the color-based segmentation process significantly increase the computational complexity especially for HD video content.